Gas delivery systems are used for the distribution of gases for the fabrication of semiconductor devices. The gases used in the fabrication of semiconductor devices are often highly toxic or corrosive. Many of these materials are drawn as a vapor from a liquid source and must be heated to prevent the vapor from condensing back to a liquid form. These systems require a high degree of modularity, very good leak integrity and must occupy a very small footprint. A typical method of accomplishing these requirements is through a surface mount system.
Surface mount systems typically require a fitting or block to bring the process gas from the outlet of one component to the inlet of the next component in the system. Typical systems couple two manifold blocks together such that they establish a common plane for both inlet and outlet seals. As will be appreciated, this can require tight tolerances of the components in order to ensure alignments of the ports of the manifold blocks with the ports of the gas component. Current systems are fabricated by mounting the manifold substrates down to a metal plate using templates to establish the appropriate substrate locations. This is very time consuming and, since these systems can be quite large with 16 separate gas lines being common, for example, it is typical to make this lower metal plate from aluminum. While aluminum helps to keep down the weight, it acts as a heat sink to draw away heat from the components that require heating.
While there are many variations of such systems available on the market today, such systems generally require very tight machining tolerances, are slow and/or difficult to assemble and can be difficult to heat. Moreover, such systems tend to be expensive.